This key is Alt-Grrrrreat
More insight into what you can do with the Alt-Gr key. Thankfully no one has sent us a lookup table of key combinations this week, but who knows what the next few days will bring.
'It means a one-handed user can still perform the three-finger salute by pressing Ctrl-Alt Gr-Del rather than having to hold down the usual Ctrl-Alt keys with two fingers and then hitting the Del key with his or her nose,' says John Ley.
So if you're one of John's colleagues, he wasn't asleep on his keyboard. He was just rebooting (slowly).
Bruce Parker has an excellent explanation for the key's overall uselessness. 'The Alt Gr key is in fact not its correct name. We have all seen the message "Hit any key", and wondered where it was – well, this is it,' he says.
Three sugars, please
We celebrate that most English of office services, the tea lady, with a picture of the ladies who started this thread: the tea servers at Croudace Homes, as supplied by Stephen Jones.
At Croudace the tea is not served with a covering of mould, and isn't stewed with a dead mouse in it, so they're better off than our readers with coffee machines. We think this is a tradition worth preserving, not least because outsourcing it to India really wouldn't be quite as good.
Any more tea ladies that you would like to celebrate? Get snapping, and send us the pictures.
Help! Please please us with lyrics and make us feel fine
Oh dear, we feel a popular thread coming on. Mike Casey, at BAE Systems, writes to us with his Beatles song lyrics. Lots of them. We could fill a whole column with them, and much as that tempts us when we're on deadline, we feel you would like a bit of a competition. So see if you can do better than:
'Yesterday /All those backups seemed a waste of pay /Now my database has gone away /Oh I believe in yesterday /Suddenly /There's not half the files there used to be /There's a milestone hanging over me /The system crashed so suddenly.'
It all sounds quite heartfelt. We hope that there's not something going on at BAE Systems we should worry about. Can you improve?
The rules are: any well-known Beatles song, and a maximum of eight lines. There's champagne for the best one, voted for by the readers, and if you're creative we will do one of our mailouts of the best entries.
All a-bored
How is it you all know so much about trolleybuses? As Graham ('I shall now go and hang up my anorak and get back to work') Stone points out: 'The last one ran in the UK in Bradford in 1972.'
Our old mate Dave Jakeman, at Atos Origin, who claims to be only just old enough to remember them, chips in with another nugget. 'The most exciting aspect of trolleybus design was: there was nothing to stop the driver turning down a road that didn't have overhead wires. So they often blocked the road in the most interesting of ways. Usually in the rush hour.'
Edward Harrison takes issue with our assertion that they had two wheels at the front and four at the back, and encloses pictures to make his point.
'While most (but not all) London trolleybuses were of the 2+4 type, some were 2+2 and some 4+2, and in the rest of the country 2+2 was common,' he says.
Why are you all interested in them? A short explanation please.
Now the trains offer time travel
Ian Hindmarsh, at Technip UK, sends us the result of his enquiry into train times to Gatwick on the transportdirect.info web site. He is not sure if Thameslink is running a new service, but it certainly seems that way to us.
'Note,' it warns. 'Certain combinations of outward and return journeys would result in you needing to leave your destination before arriving at it.'
Well hello, trolley
A challenge for anyone who has been visiting the site that maps abandoned shopping trolleys in Nottingham.
'Who can be first to spell out the word Backbytes on the map by judicious positioning of trolleys around the town?' says Derek Pattenson. If you do, we shall appear as a witness for the defence.
It's all Greek to us
More on Y/N dialog boxes. 'Has anyone considered our Greek friends yet?' says Peter Hood, at the University of Huddersfield. 'O/N seems reasonable for them, but N (ne) is yes.' Which explains some things.
'Some people know that the Greek letter N in lower-case actually looks like a V,' says David Parish, at PCMC UK, who wrote to us on the same subject.
'But not a lot of people know that this V is the historical origin of the tick mark used for affirmation - a quickly written v indicating nai.' Still with us?
On the trolleybuses? That’s made our day, that has
First of all, to the most important item in BB this week: trolleybuses. We covered the exciting quest that reader Peter Joyce is making for trolleybus rails last week. Not that we knew, but every single reader of Computing old enough to remember trolleybuses pointed out that they didn’t run on rails.
‘When he has time, I would be delighted for him to join our group looking for hens’ teeth,’ says Nelson Bowker.
‘Vehicles running on rails half-buried in the road are called trams,’ says reader Stan Higgins, aged 85, so he should know.
‘Hence their alternative name of trackless trams,’ adds George Stringwell, whose wife says he is pedantic.
‘Trolleybuses were so-called because they had two pickups, one for negative and one for positive, which were connected by two poles via trolleys which hooked onto two overhead wires. As readers will know, trams have only the one overhead pickup as the return electricity path is through the tram rails, like mainline trains,’ adds Paul Kemp, giving us the technical detail we didn’t ask for.
‘As long as their two trolleys were connected, they could swerve all over the road as well as any bus. In fact, they had even more rubber insulation than a bus. They had two wheels at the front and four at the back. How’s that for nerdishness?’ Quite sufficient, thank you.
Negative feedback
We’re investigating lost zeros on financial transactions, but Graham Hyde, who works in local government somewhere in the middle of the country, once went one better when he wrote a program to balance ledger transactions for his employer’s transport workshops and move the money between accounts.
‘Having passed all the usual rounds of testing, balancing nicely to zero, it got implemented. Unfortunately I was new to the job, having trained on manufacturing systems. No one had thought to tell me that a credit on a ledger is negative, so the workshops ended up paying the customers for the privilege of servicing their vehicles.’
If only we could get that into a few more garages, the world would be a fairer place.
Tea up – four times a day
We asked for your reminiscences of tea ladies, but we never expected Stephen Jones to write to let us know that ‘At Croudace Homes we have no need to “remember” the tea ladies. We are still lucky enough to have them, furnishing us with four cups per day.’
How lovely. Does anyone else have a tea lady, or have they all been outsourced? If you do, please send pictures so we can salute this threatened breed of support personnel.
Colour me confused
It’s a relief to get back to the really important issues. For example, how the Alt-Gr key got its name. We begin with an exciting – yet not particularly true – story from James Bostock.
‘IBM’s PC keyboards used to have multicoloured lettering. Alt functions were red, Shift items blue, etc. When all the keys were used up they added some green-coloured characters. But what should they call the new key they added to access these characters? With typical IBM creativity, they came up with the name Alt, but in green to differentiate it from the Alt (red). When the cost of producing rainbow-lettered keyboards became prohibitive, the new key was labelled Alt-Gr, for green. At least, that’s the tale I was told when I was working
for Big Blue.’ You should have heard some of the stories they tried to tell us at the time, James.
The consensus view, however, seems to be that represented by Adam Dempsey: ‘Alt-Gr means Alternate Graphics, but it isn’t used nowadays.’ The graphics that we have being quite sufficient.
At Avena Carpets, a reader who chooses to remain anonymous decided to try out the key following our dramatic exposé.
‘No one in our office had any idea what it was for,’ he says. ‘I decided to show the article to our secretary, in case there were any useful shortcuts she could use. Three minutes later and the entire screen had turned upside down. Rebooting didn’t work, so I started pressing keys much in the same way as she had done before - randomly - as she rang our local IT guy.’
Luckily, the random key approach worked. But let that be a lesson to you all.
An MS-SOD of an OS
Cliff Lawson’s in touch again from Amstrad, presumably via one of those little telephones that sends emails, to question the veracity of our report on IBM and its problems in Spain marketing Dos and OS/2 2.0 (‘OS dos dos’).
‘The Spanish for “disc operating system” is “sistema operativo de disco”, so I doubt they were actually confused,’ he says, disappointingly. ‘It does lead me to wonder if they might have been confused wondering whether MS-SOD 3.3 was an English or a Spanish acronym, though.’
Turkish delight
Antony Hawkins has the job we all wanted: he’s webmaster at www.pedalcars.info.
‘I have a number of security systems in place to spot and report hacking attempts,’ he says. ‘Recently we have seen a substantial number originating from Turk Telekom IP addresses. We report hacking attacks to the ISP, using the listed abuse addresses.’
Turk Telekom has never replied or even acknowledged the complaints, so Antony concluded that the staff weren’t checking the abuse email address, which he reported to the authorities.
‘As a courtesy I copied the email to Turk Telekom’s abuse address,’ he says. ‘The result? For the first time, an automated reply: “This message was undeliverable due to the following reason: the user(s) account is temporarily over quota”.’
As he points out, you have to love the irony.
Performing an appendectomy with a paperclip
Robert Pinsker, at TRL Technology, was trying to find out how to do section numbering for the last section of his long report, so he asked Word’s help paperclip for help numbering his appendix.
‘Word’s response – as often these days – was too clever by half,’ he says. It recommended Access for People with Disabilities.
Zero worship
‘Far be it from me to suggest this,’ says Tom Lawton, suggesting it anyway, ‘but your correspondent Nigel Seager might do well to keep transferring money between his accounts.’
If you recall, Nigel found that a transfer between accounts at the Alliance & Leicester lost a zero, which led him to the knowledge that the transfers had been printed and rekeyed.
At some point, Tom points out, A&L could make the same mistake in return, ‘and put £4,000 into an account, having taken only £400 out of the other account. Or do you think the bank might spot a mistake that goes against it just a bit quicker than it spotted the one that went in its favour?’
So cynical. As if that would happen. So it’s time for some completely unrepresentative research: anyone else either found or lost a zero on a transfer?
Dos-t in translation
It’s not just dialogue boxes that get lost in translation, points out Stephen Rollinson.
‘I used to work for IBM, and was sent to Spain, where they had great problems with a product called just ‘Two’ – Dos. This was bad, but then it got worse because we also had versions of Two (3.3, 4.0, 5, 7).’
And to think we Brits only found Dos confusing because we couldn’t type the commands correctly.
As Stephen points out, the move to a graphical user interface only made this tougher. ‘As if they weren’t confused enough they had to suffer “OS dos” – OS/2 – which also had versions 1.1 and 1.3.’
And for the poor Spanish OS/2 IBM user, the worst was yet to come with release 2.0 – giving them the choice between Dos cinco and OS dos dos.
Cup final
More on coffee machines. Ollie Hurden recalls the time when he worked at Gravatom Engineering, when the management decided to dispense with the tea ladies and introduce vending machines. Those of you born after 1980 should ask your older colleagues what a tea lady is.
On the exciting day in question, his co-worker Frank was the first to try out the new machine. A few moments later Frank returned without coffee, and announced that the robotics ‘needed tweaking’. He had made his selection, inserted the coin and pressed the start button. The machine delivered the cup, coffee, sugar and water correctly – though with one problem. It sent the cup last.
Off his trolley
Peter Joyce read our piece about the web site that plots abandoned trolleys on a map of Nottingham as a work of art.
‘I went straight to the site with eager anticipation. I was aghast to see a picture of a shopping trolley, not a trolley-bus. As a keen digger-upper of old trolley-bus rails, I was hoping for some new sightings. Back to the surreptitious metal detecting in the heart of our cities.’
How does one surreptitiously detect metal? And if you do dig up old trolley-bus rails, what do you do with them, there not being any trolley-buses to run on them?
Suddenly the shopping trolley thing seems almost worthwhile…
That winking feeling
A stunning reaction to the problem of what to do with the Alt-Gr key. Squillions of you write to say that Alt-Gr-4 is how you type the Euro symbol.
‘But what it’s been doing between 1985 and the introduction of the Euro symbol is still a mystery,’ says Andrew Kirby.
‘On an Argentinian keyboard, you have to press Alt-Gr+2 to produce the @ sign,’ adds David Walton. Others point out that Alt-Gr allows you to add accents to letters, and a few go so far as to send in little ready reckoner tables.
But the mystery is solved by Robert Eccleston, at Creation Financial Services. ‘It’s essential if you want to make a Winking-man-with-moustache Smiley Face out of the top left key, the one next to the exclamation mark, like this: `¬ı ,’ he says. ‘Isn’t technology marvellous?’
Now we want to know what the ‘Gr’ stands for.
Expert alert
Nick Clark provides this week’s job of the week, from Jobserve. ‘Please can your Skillswatch colleagues let me know what the current hourly rate is?’ he says.
We can’t, Nick, because, like you, we have no idea what the job actually is.
‘We are actively recruiting for a major blue chip client of ours in the automotive industry. We are looking for a subject matter expert who is concerned with VMS operating systems,’ it says, opaquely. ‘Candidates from an automotive background will certainly be benefited.’
Question: does that mean most of the time we recruit ‘non-experts’? Look around your office, then you decide.
Yust the yob
Some of you are still wondering about international dialog boxes which have Y, S and N so that people can click ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in several languages.
Chris Hartley, the ‘head git’ at Goldstar Computer Consultants, voices the concern of a nation: ‘Countries where J is pronounced Y made me wonder how they pronounce AS400/Iseries commands.’ He’s amused by the prospect of DMPJOB (Dump Job) and ENDJOB.
‘Am I a candidate for your sadness farm?’ he asks, plaintively. Yes, Chris.
Pets win prizes
Tim Medcalf strikes a blow for intelligent users over stupid support staff by recounting the problem his colleague Brian had when on the line to AOL support. In the middle of the conversation, the support tech decided to throw in a quick ID question, while continuing to read from his script:
Brian: The problem is that when I try to connect…
AOL: What was the name of your first pet?
Brian: I’m sorry?
AOL: I’m afraid I can’t accept that answer.
Brian: I meant, can you repeat what you just said?
AOL: I said, “I’m afraid I can’t accept that answer.”
They’re still on the phone.
Noughts and cross
Nigel Seager, at Precision Dataprep Services, transferred £4,000 between his deposit and current accounts at the Alliance & Leicester last week, but was surprised to find the next day that only £400 had made it across.
‘I was keen to track down my missing zero, not least so that wages could be paid,’ he said. After many calls to the A&L helpline, the company finally admitted that it has to ‘manually re-enter all inter-account transfers and the zero had been left on the paper print-out of my transaction.’
Does this mean their computers are full of tiny men doing the paperwork? If you’re one of them, please sneak out of the box tonight and send us an email.
Making their online presence felt
‘Having an online existence for your business was not even thought of in the early 1990s. But today, having an online presence has become as important as having your own office or premises,’ says PPS-UK in an email sent out to prospective customers.
Sue Todd, at Firstline Interactive Systems, passes it on, but thankfully only once, which means we received 228 fewer than Sue did, and 599 fewer than one of her colleagues. Thankfully the ‘Microsoft Registered Partner’ declared itself against spam email, or it could have been worse.
When Sue called to politely enquire if they could stop sending her the email, PPS told her that they weren’t sure how to do that.
As the email says: ‘All that you are required to provide is the content and wait for the results to materialise’. Unstoppably, it seems.
Unplug the coffee machine, and do yourself a favour
‘You know when you make coffee sometimes, and you get the little black bits of undissolved coffee in it? Well, this happened with our coffee machine, and for a couple of weeks we just thought that the water wasn’t hot enough to dissolve the coffee granules,’ says Felicity Needham, at Encon Insulation. You know where this is going, don’t you?
‘It wasn’t until the maintenance man came to clean the machine that we realised that a colony of ants had set up home in our coffee machine, and that we had been drinking their corpses in our coffee.
Everybody stuck to water for quite a while afterwards.’ Enjoying your beverage? More coffee machine stories please.
The key to the ALT GR problem
‘Dear Backbytes. Can anyone shed some light on what the ALT GR key does?’ asks Edward Jones, at NVS.
The best we can offer is that it plugs a gap in the keyboard to the right of the space bar, but we jiggled it and it worked so it must do something. Or must have done something once in 1985.
Please advise.
Who wants to start the bidding?
As a new eBay user, Simon Goldstone contacted eBay with a question about the bid system. In response, the company sent him this to ‘clear up the confusion’: ‘When a single bidder has consecutive bids on a reserve item, and the bid does not meet the reserve, any consecutive bids placed by the same bidder will not influence the current bid price. Although there are multiple bids, the current bid price will not increase because the proxy bid system does not raise the bid until a competing bidder places a bid, or a bidder raises their maximum bid and it meets the reserve.’
So, that’s clear, then.
AB negative
Our exciting story of printer switch boxes prompts some reminiscence from former civil servant Niall Fisher.
‘Seven years ago I worked in the civil service, and one day I was asked to go down to the finance office and install a printer switch box between two computers and a printer. We didn’t have any more automatic switch boxes, and the printer was not network-capable, so I had to use a manual 2-port switch.’ His instructions to the two users:
Niall: Jason: you are on switch A. When you want to print, switch the box to point at A.
Jason: OK.
Niall: Emma, you are on switch B. When you want to print, you have to make sure the switch box is pointing to B.
Emma: Right.
Niall then left for lunch, returning to discover a new support call from finance. Emma had been trying all lunchtime to print a document, but for a reason she didn’t understand the printer did not respond. Niall successfully resolved the problem by moving the switch to ‘B’.
He doesn’t say if Jason has been trying to print something since 1998 as a result.
